Rumours that Apple would kill the iPod may have been far from the mark, but it doesn't stop rival companies wrestling for their own portion of the portable music player pie, despite smartphones eroding this market. Indeed, Sony still knocks out respectable PMPs and its latest A-series Walkmans are slick, lightweight models with storage options from 8GB to 64GB to suit different budgets.

If there was a reason that Cray CEO Peter Ungaro, who formerly ran IBM's high performance computing biz, was a little extra perky when the company announced its third quarter financials two weeks ago, it was not just because the SC11 supercomputing trade show was coming to Cray's hometown of Seattle this week. Or that Advanced Micro Devices was once again late with an Opteron launch and had hurt its numbers.

Speculation regarding a possible Israeli air campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities has been rife for years – a pair of MIT students wrote an analysis on the subject back in 2007, and countless articles have appeared before then and since. Now, however, it's possible to do more than simply talk about such a battle: should you wish to, you can set aside the Monopoly or the chess set in favour of a rousing boardgame pitting one player as Iran against another as Israel, with preservation or destruction of Tehran's nuclear capability as the prize.

Cybercrims should get tough sentences, according to the head of Scotland Yard's e-crime unit, who criticised judges for going easy on e-banking fraudsters while throwing the book at the their old-school cohorts in crime.

Apple was planning to launch the iPhone 5 this year, but it bottled it because Steve Jobs wasn't happy, Business Insider reports, quoting a source who claims to have played with a prototype months before the 4S was announced.

It's clear that there are fundamental changes happening in the way people, and businesses, want to work. The relentless pace of technology developments has given us ever better and more connected notebooks, and now smartphones and tablets. This means we can work wherever and whenever it suits.

For a certain type of alphabetised-DVD-collection Doctor Who fan, there’s a crafty mental reset button that can be pressed when encountering deeply uncomfortable concepts. Concepts such as when the Eighth Doctor, Paul McGann, casually let it slip that he was actually half-human, or upon hearing the Doctor In Distresscharity single, or when Tom Baker told John Culshaw he had erotic designs on Davros.

Iran admitted on Sunday that unspecified computer systems in the country had been infected with the Duqu worm, a strain of malware similar to the infamous Stuxnet worm that sabotaged key nuclear plant systems in the country last year.

A nuclear powerplant in Sweden was put out of action for seven months at a cost of 1.8 billion kronor (£170m) after a vacuum cleaner was mistakenly left inside its containment vessel during tests, according to reports.

If you're sick of applying Sinex before sleep, fearful that snores will prompt your spouse to groan, prod and eventually stick an old sock in your mouth, then perhaps this robotic polar bear is the way forward.

Open-source social network Diaspora has launched a redesigned alpha version of its software, with invites going out to users of the site hours before it was confirmed that co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 22, had died.

Desktop replacement laptops are a genre of portable computer apparently intent on chuntering on forever without ever truly succeeding or dying. By nature, they tend not to be petite, and Samsung's RV720 is no exception.

So the tantalum for the capacitors in our electronics comes from columbo-tantalite, which is coltan, which comes from militias in the Congo, so we should have a law making sure that no tantalum for our electronics comes from militias in the Congo. Fine, we do have that now, it's part of Dodd Frank*, and how's it working out?

For the first time since the Top 500 rankings of supercomputers was started back in 1993, the top 10 machines on the list are ranked in exactly the same order as they were in the list six months ago. But the HPC racket is set to explode, with multi-petaflops machines in the works using new processors and GPU coprocessors.

Skyrim is set in the land of the Nords, a craggy treacherous landscape that reminds me of George R R Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire and has the same epic scale. After the King of Skyrim is assassinated the land is plunged into civil war and the region has become severed from the rest of the empire. The game starts by leading me to my execution, luckily it is cut short by a very fiery intervention.

Supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics has been chomping at the bit for Intel to get its "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 servers to market. And rather than wait until early next year to launch its new ICE X parallel machines to market, and give rival Cray and its Opteron 6200-based XE6 and XK6 supers all the headlines at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle this week, SGI decided to preview the dense-pack ICE X machines that will employ the Xeon E5s and have actually begun shipping to selected customers.

Google supremo Eric Schmidt reckons that the internet is making politics work better, telling business leaders at the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation APEC conference in Honolulu that the web keeps governments of the world honest.

Papier-mache is no longer just for primary school art projects: eco-nuts in Suffolk have decided to start packaging wine in the stuff. You could soon be supping a fine Rioja poured from an oblong paper shell lined with a plastic bag, thanks to British start-up GreenBottle.

The UK PC market could be bottoming out after most of the major vendors posted sequential quarterly growth, abacus stroker Gartner has claimed. However HP, Acer and Dell PC sales are still in a nosedive compared to last year's shipments.

Given the great strides that Ethernet and InfiniBand networking have made in the past decade, you would think that there wasn't much room for proprietary interconnects linking together nodes in parallel supercomputers.

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices said during a restructuring announced two weeks ago that it was going to take low-power servers seriously again. And as part of the Opteron 6200 and 4200 processor launches this morning at an event in Beijing, and at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle, Washington, AMD has tweaked its Opteron roadmap and brought back the low-end, single-socket server processor.

There is no need to rewrite the basic internet protocols to beef up security, Vint Cerf has said. He also warned that governments are making increasingly heavy-handed attempts to take control of the interwebs.

We've seen a lot of ARM server activity in recent weeks, with ARM chip upstart Calxeda announcing its 5-watt EnergyCore ARM chip (breakdown here) and a partnership with x86 giant HP (outlined here). Also the ARM architecture is getting a necessary but painfully slow 64-bit makeover, slated to roll out in 2014.

Researchers have discovered malware circulating in the wild that uses a private signing certificate belonging to the Malaysian government to bypass warnings many operating systems and security software display when end users attempt to run untrusted applications.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain has been an enthusiastic supporter of using IBM's Power970MP blade servers as a foundation for its "MareNostrum" massively parallel Linux cluster, which fills 44 server racks and delivers 94.1 teraflops of number-crunching punch.

One of the world's most advanced pieces of malware is being used to spread DNS Changer, a trojan at the heart of a massive click fraud scheme that has already hijacked 4 million PCs, security researchers said.

The hardware configurations for the 2011 SC Student Cluster Competition in Seattle have been released, and there are quite a few surprises. First, the most surprising surprise: the University of Texas Longhorn team has brought the first liquid cooled system to the big dance.